


The Unspoken

by FireEye



Category: Final Fantasy I
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-25
Updated: 2012-05-25
Packaged: 2017-11-06 00:39:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/412800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FireEye/pseuds/FireEye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before Professor Unne became the premier scholar on the Lefeinish language, he was a mere unassuming linguist of considerable talent.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Unspoken

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Estirose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Estirose/gifts).



> Prompt: Dr. Unne is fascinating to me because he's a scholar. I'd love to have a story about him trying to learn Lufenian, if he eventually went to Lufenia, or maybe some of his adventures along the way.

Afternoon sunlight spilled through the window, illuminating the manuscripts sprawled across the desk. It was, perhaps, the best time of the day for study, yet the man’s mind wandered towards other endeavors. The words on the page seemed to scatter and reform, even his own scratchy handwriting, at second glance, appeared unfamiliar. The book was an ancient epic, filled with wizards and witches and dragons and the hearts of heroes, youths, and maidens.

His own days were less exciting, even as the days grew darker. Letters from his brother were no grand adventure; the beasts grew fierce and the hearts of men, dwarves, and elves fell to corruption. Shifting in his chair, the young scholar focused on the passage before him, an antiquated account of love and beauty and meaningless in the modern world. A shadow fell across the page, and he blinked.

“Professor Unne.”

He had heard the footfalls echoing through the chambers and respectfully ignored them. Looking up, Unne found a man wearing the insignia of the militia staring down at him, eclipsing the light. “Yes.”

“The linguist.”

“If you’re looking for mentorship, I could send along a scribe to-”

“Come with me.” The man squared his steps around the desk, and marched through the open archway.

Unne stared, started, then stumbled forth from his chair and followed as far as the door, tightening the sash of his robe. “Excuse me?”

The stranger paused and turned to face him.

“Come with me,” he repeated, even-toned. “Please.”

~*~

In the basement of the temple of the north side of town, four of the city’s militia huddled at the edge of the room around the ladder, parting as Unne and his escort arrived and closing in behind them. Unne’s escort - a solemn, sulking man whose name, Delaré, Unne had dragged forth through sheer duress, huddled hung back with his cohorts, nodding the professor towards the east wall. The foundation had cracked, and been pulled down, revealing a room beyond.

A storeroom, it seemed; tiled, like the rest of the basement floor, and filled with chests and shelves and trinkets. Professor Nimdril knelt upon the floor, cleaning years of grime from what appeared to be an old pocketwatch. When he noticed Unne’s presence, he thumbed to a steel case in the corner near the broken wall. “Make yourself useful, Professor.”

Unne did as instructed, lifting the box – lightweight, no sound from within, the size of a large tome – and moving beneath the lantern to study the glyphs embossed upon its every side. He ran his thumb over the keyhole, then the inscription surrounding it.

“It’s Lefeinish.”

“Worthless, then,” Nimdril grunted.

“Not necessarily,” Unne replied, shaking the box to no effect. No sound, no shift of weight.

“The damnable thing won’t open.”

Again, Unne studied the keyhole. “Pick the lock.”

“Something’s jammed it.”

Unne smiled wistfully, setting the box down between the pile of gray cloth and the archaeologist sitting on the floor. He studied the assortment of artifacts, preserved since the wall was erected, and lifted a human skull from its resting place beneath the far wall. “You should count yourself lucky, Professor. Most people don’t make their best discoveries in their own back yard.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Nimdril snickered, “While you’re here, you may as well help me sort this junk.”

~*~

A woman stood at the foot of his bed. She was pale as freshly fallen snow, skin glowing in the scant moons’ light. Her hair bled into midnight, pulled back into a tight knot he could barely see outlined against the oaken bookshelves behind her. The planes and angles of her face were exotic to him – yet she was human clearly, for she was neither chiseled of stone and moss as with dwarves nor of a creature of twisted ethereal sinews as with elves. Her clothing spoke nothing of who she was; she was draped in pale, undyed cloth, similar enough to his scholar’s robes at a glance yet of a vastly different cut and fold, with a loop at from which a blade was suspended. A scarf wrapped around her neck, brilliant red, drawing his eye.

She was speaking, he realized, as his attention settled once again upon her face. And it seemed she had been speaking the entire time. The words that fell in time with her lips danced and trebled; they trilled in highs and lows, vowels and consonants rising in pitch and harmony to one another. The sound seeped from the air itself, as though it no longer remembered the throat to which it belonged, merely that it had once been spoken.

They were words Unne, for all his long years of dedicated learning, did not know.

He awoke with the sun in his eyes, and Delaré at his doorstep.

~*~

Nimdril’s room within the University dormitory was in disarray. There was nothing unusual about that, save for Nimdril himself. The archaeologist’s throat had been cut in his sleep, according to the militiaman. Unne felt a lump of ice form in his chest; they may not have been friends, but colleagues certainly.

“He was discovered by a page when he missed a recitation,” Delaré finished his long explanation. “Where were you last night?”

Unne blinked. At length, he cognized the question, shaking his head clear of the unholy view before him. “In my study.”

“Were you alone?”

“I was expounding a treatise on the splintered evolution of dialects between Northern Trade and Southern Trade.” The scholar scoffed. “Most people would find that boring.” Under Delaré’s unwavering scrutiny, Unne realized his mistake. His eyebrows raised, and he choked out, “You think _I_ did this?”

“Hardly.” An old woman, wrapped in the tattered red robes of a sage, straightened from where she crouched beyond the bed. “But you and he shared words and experience, and so that which attacked him may have also visited upon you.”

The sage hobbled around the bed, weak in one leg, leaning heavily upon a heavily carven walking stick. She pressed her fingers to Unne’s forehead, muttering a Word, before opening her eyes.

“Take these,” the sage gestured to a scribe, who handed him Nimdril’s enigmatic metal box and a cloth-covered object resting atop of it. “I feel they will be safest with you, and we don’t want another poor soul stumbling across them in the dark.”

“What do I do?”

“Whatever you please. Delaré... it is Delaré, isn’t it?” Before Delaré could answer, the sage waved her hand, dispelling the matter. “Keep our young friend company.”

Unease settled in Unne’s gut, to match the ice in his blood. Delaré merely scowled at him and waved him from the room, following him after.

~*~

Wraithish trees lined the edge of the clearing, crowding black and indistinct against one another; their bare limbs stretched high against a vast depth of stars. The clearing itself was empty of flowers or grass, or living things, save one.

The pale stranger stood in the center of it all, one hand on the hilt of her long blade. Unne stood before her, frozen by her empty stare. For a brief moment, he considered running, to chance the dark forest rather than the apparition before him. In that same moment, the woman drew her sword and it arced towards his throat.

 

Amid his blankets, Unne thrashed until his back rested against the headboard, and his breathing stilled. He raised a hand to his neck uneasily, only to jerk his hand away at the stinging sensation. His fingers came away slick with blood.

From atop the locked box upon his personal desk, the skull grinned at him.

For a long, shaky breathe, Unne wondered if he had survived the dream.

He sashed his robe and, staggering forth into the morning, found that Delaré still stood outside his door, watching the shadows skeptically.

~*~

“Are you certain this is the place?”

“Yes,” Unne answered. The trees were in the full bloom of spring. Birds fluttered between their branches, and a pair of angry squirrels traded insults in the distance. A carpet of green grass covered the dead glade of his dreams, but he knew this was the place. _Hoped_ this was the place. “Of course.”

The sage regarded him for a moment, tapping a finger upon her walking stick.

“Tell me, young master,” the old woman’s gaze swept across the grass, following the path of the mid-afternoon sun, “Have you ever beheld the plague fields?”

Unne shrugged. “I’ve never been west of the River.”

“The earth swallows the bones, but... nothing much grows aside grass and weeds.”

“So there are plague victims? Here?” Shifting his weight uneasily, the scholar frowned. The plague was a far too recent memory, although he had not seen its horror in person. He had no desire to.

“Something quite different, I think.” The sage spoke a Word, tapping the butt of her stick against the earth. The ground shivered beneath their feet. Rocks and dirt bubbled up from beneath the grass, and bones. Uncountable bones.

“Slaves,” she said. “Old, nameless, forgotten souls from a bloodier world.”

The old sage wasted no time in chanting, calling forth the spirits of light and shadow. The steadfast rhythm reminded Unne he was still alive, reminded him to _breathe_. Crouching among the bones, he pulled the satchel from his hip and drew from it the skull that haunted his dreams. He placed it reverently among its kindred, and hoped the old woman’s prayers worked... for the ghost as well as for his own sake.

As he twisted his legs to stand, he paused, for beneath his hand rested a scrap of string, vibrant red. And at the end of the string, between his fingers, a tarnished, rusty key.

~*~

Facing the ocean, she stood on the dilapidated path that had, in antiquity, been a processional road. Now it ended at the ocean’s edge, broken flagstones washed smooth by the rolling waves that washed through her bare feet.

Unne’s feet moved him forward, one heavy step at a time, although the sane, _rational_ part of him dreaded doing so. She was dead and long buried; she was a ghost, appeased and cleansed. The sage had said so. Yet here she stood, unbound, apart from his nightmares; if he reached out, he could touch the scarf that flapped soundlessly in a gentle breeze that carried a tang of brine.

As he came to stand by her side, she moved, suddenly and with deliberation, forcing his gaze from the tattered end of the scarf. Expecting a deathblow that didn’t land, Unne followed the line of her arm, hand, and delicately poised fingers, and only beheld miles of dark, rolling, empty sea.

“I don’t unders-...”

Before he could finish the statement, the wind picked up, catching hold of her scarf. It unraveled, and the woman followed it, drifting to dust over the ocean.

“...tand.”

Unne watched the ocean roll, timelessly. At length, when the stars had faded and the sky grew light with dawn’s approach, he turned towards home. Head full, heart heavy.

~*~

The ghost was gone. Nimdril was dead – a loss to the University, to be certain. Unne was alive, and he wasn’t wasting what fate had handed him.

He had to write it down.

It was difficult, when he only knew a fraction of the tale. Every few paragraphs, he paused to consider the contents of the sealed box. Within, there slept pages upon pages, written in a script that was achingly familiar and painfully alien.

 _Lefeinish_.

The scholar sighed, resting his cheek against his knuckles as he blindly studied his own script under his quill.

The pages may as well have been written by the squirrels in the forest. The Lefein did not trade. They did not exchange culture or knowledge. No one knew why they were so insular, and during those rare times when communication was established, it was always on their terms.

Unne didn’t know of any contact between the University and the Lefein within his lifetime. Nor did he know of anyone in existence who knew the language or the understood the writing, who were not Lefein themselves. The University records were scant on the subject, providing rare glimpses and nothing concrete.

Of the language itself, there were the occasional recorded letters, transcribed or rubbed from old stone surfaces, and nothing more. No cipher, no language.

And here, along with the written words that danced enticingly across the page, were sketches, painstaking in their detail, mainly portraiture of men and women. Slaves, perchance. One image he returned to, again and again, tracing the edges of the parchment as he studied the stranger within.

Stoic, grim, determined; the effigy of a woman long dead stared back.

**Author's Note:**

> Initially, this story had a slightly different spin to it, before it fell off the deep end and into the supernatural route and dragged me along with it. Strange how I never realized that Unne spent all his time puttering around in a graveyard!
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. :)


End file.
